Process Blog

Beginning to move farther into the actual pieces, I've created an eye for the vampire Alexander, of the Harbingers of Skulls. Ole' Alex is basically a walking corpse with an acute interest in the mortality he has been denied, and spends a great deal of time cutting people open to see how they tick (and to see the ticking stop).

I focused on the underlying structure of the body with this piece and worked a lot with translucent layering, saving the opaques for surface highlighting and the pupil. I also tried out my dichroic decals for the first time with the pupil's coloration. I made a couple attempts at clouding the eye over with a milky cataract, but felt it undercut the effect of being looked at by too much for the piece to remain effective.

Moving on, we have Eve, an artificial intelligence effectively undergoing adolescence. The player described her as curious and in many ways rather carefree (with the belief in her immortality native to teenagers everywhere, I think), but one of the things which really stuck with me in the description is how the character was removed from play: her primary contact with the world was severed, leaving her as an isolated computer. For that reason, I went with a largely silhouetted profile with can be seen as emerging towards a surface or falling away from it, and her expression is rather stricken.

The piece is comparatively minimalistic, and while I like it, I may shift the rest of the work to more strongly favor the eyes. During a critique, it was noted that the portraits allow you to look at the character, but when they are cut down to the eyes alone, the character is looking at you. I think that serves me better, particularly considering the way many of these alter-egos are kept out of public view. Even if you don't want to tell your classmates or co-workers about your knight/vampire/fursona, what happens when the character is able to look right at them and you don't have to explain yourself?